Destructive Anachronismhttps://benjaminntaylor.com
Musings of a 33-yr. old writer of fiction and assorted commentary, eternal student and bibliophile, Arsenal fanatic, polyglot Germanophile, Democratic Socialist, feminist, Unitarian and staunch advocate of LGBTQ+ equality. Let your freak flag fly.
Sat, 03 Nov 2018 17:49:37 +0000 en
hourly
1 http://wordpress.com/https://benjaminntaylor.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/cropped-copyofouroboros_by_saki_blackwing-1.jpg?w=32Destructive Anachronismhttps://benjaminntaylor.com
3232Is this just fantasy?https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/11/03/is-this-just-fantasy/
https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/11/03/is-this-just-fantasy/#respondSat, 03 Nov 2018 08:03:07 +0000http://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/11/03/is-this-just-fantasy/Today’s tilt against top of table (level on points with City, second on GD) and unbeaten Liverpool is easily the most important match of the young season for Unai Emery’s crew. While one can’t dismiss the opening pair of losses to title contenders City and Chelsea, this is now a squad with its own 13-game unbeaten streak in hand and a growing acclimation to Emery’s pace and attack forward scheme. Liverpool will not be facing the Arsenal of August. Yet the questions remain: can this rather shoddy back three survive Mane, Firmino, and Salah?

Critically, though, this is one of those seemingly few and fewer EPL matches in which the outcome matters more than the politics — an Arsenal win cements their status as a return to top-four and potential chaos breaker title challengers; a draw pushes Arsenal to a dogfight for top-four, to Liverpool cementing top-four, but dampening title hopes; a Liverpool win puts Arsenal on the back foot with a fixture stretch ahead in the waning days of 2018 that includes two North London derbies (both at the Emirates), and trips to Old Trafford and Anfield, and makes Liverpool v. Man City the race to watch among the major leagues. Top-four was my hope in a Emery’s inaugural season — a chance at a treble (EPL, FA, Carabao/League Cup), however unlikely, is beyond my wildest dreams.

Whew. One match at a time, Benji.

]]>https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/11/03/is-this-just-fantasy/feed/0benjaminntaylorThe Heart is a…https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/10/13/the-heart-is-a/
https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/10/13/the-heart-is-a/#respondSat, 13 Oct 2018 21:56:22 +0000http://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/10/13/the-heart-is-a/When we post un-narrated risible phone videos to our favorite platforms, certain that this — this! captures more than anything else l’esprit du temps. Only in *this* moment, we tell ourselves, is the full nature of existence distilled down, readymade for American consumption. Cowboys and clowns, oder? Yet the camera, the graphic chip, the video card, can never quite capture the Now-ness of a moment. Time cannot not proceed while attempts are made to crystallize that which has already passed. The self-image has lost its exchange value — one’s body, the basic unit of currency has long (a decade is an eternity) been rendered worthless in light of the endless pornography available for no cost to the viewer. And fuck the viewee — that’s what she or he is there for, no? The IG “snap,” carefully edited, posed and posted only when it’s certain to receive the maximum views is always already obsolete. For a market in which marginal value accrues to those who provide most dear at pennies, the camera, the iPhone, IG, Twitter — they don’t stop watching. The world does not sleep.
]]>https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/10/13/the-heart-is-a/feed/0benjaminntaylorZero.https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/10/13/zero/
https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/10/13/zero/#respondSat, 13 Oct 2018 21:20:06 +0000http://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/10/13/zero/I opened this thinking to write something short and witty related to scraping frost off of my beat-up Civic (Arsenal, Dartmouth, HRC, and rainbow stickers prominent) and how much of a pain in any ass that is, but people I don’t know personally (whatever that, in 2018, means) unintentionally dissuaded me. I’m torn. Part of me wants to swear fealty to the chaos and just respond when asked, “Who rules here?” answer “No one and never.”

Part of me just wants to be left alone, to pursue what mind beyond Tennyson’s bounds may drift.

What I fear is the adoption of neither, rather of “leave us alone. This is not our fight.” Now, “Game of Thrones” is a fiction based on a fiction. But the underlying themes are present with us at our gyms, on our subways, in our boardrooms, at our food trucks, our reflecting pools. Physical space belongs always to those who control it. The mind and the spirit, however, obey no one. Free to stalk the discarded dreams of stars dead long ago, fire and light reaching us millennia after their extinguishing. …almost makes one believe in light or something akin to, say, redemption?

]]>https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/10/13/zero/feed/0benjaminntaylorNo Ruleshttps://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/30/no-rules/
https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/30/no-rules/#respondSun, 30 Sep 2018 22:57:41 +0000http://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/30/no-rules/It’s sometimes hard to remember that there are no rules. If I wanted to write about a chick (of the poultry variety) who staggered across a mescaline stash in the Sonoran Desert, pecked a prophetic mantis to death, then imbibed with locusts’ honey and sacred spring water (for €19.95) and saw the face of some wayward god gnawing on Shostakovich’s left ear while Anchises conducted Tilson Thomas’s orchestra of the moment to Balanchine choreography of Götterdämmerung in the key of B and Hart Crane proclaiming the end of times unincorporated by Superchunk, well: I can fucking do that.
]]>https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/30/no-rules/feed/0benjaminntaylorhttps://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/15/5796/
https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/15/5796/#respondSat, 15 Sep 2018 21:01:35 +0000http://benjaminntaylor.com/?p=5796Instagram can suck my… imagination, deploy! Hint: he’s judging you.
]]>https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/15/5796/feed/0benjaminntaylorhttps://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/13/5793/
https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/13/5793/#respondThu, 13 Sep 2018 10:16:43 +0000http://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/13/5793/I’ve long felt a sort of kinship with John Cheever, for many reasons; reading Falconer, finally, serves to remind me that he worked with Carrara marble; I work with Mississippi mud at best. Rock River effluent most days. However, I was barely eight when the scum from Spring Creek, gurgling through concrete pipes that assumed mythical status then, to lead across rocks deemed ancient in our prepubescent authority to rocks speckled with fossils, the meaning of which we were discouraged to inquire after. At that age, everything of any significance comes from Middle Earth. Those lands were more real than our mundane little worlds.
]]>https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/13/5793/feed/0benjaminntaylorA Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/07/a-hard-rains-a-gonna-fall/
https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/07/a-hard-rains-a-gonna-fall/#respondFri, 07 Sep 2018 19:24:00 +0000http://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/07/a-hard-rains-a-gonna-fall/The day is coming soon when to be anti-LGBTQ, anti-gender equality, anti-racial equality, ableism, ageism — any approach to the world that does not recognize the equality of all living things on the basis of their inherent characteristics, rather than the accidents of physical presentation — will be universally recognized with disgust and deserved ostracism. Not to support ostracism as a means of bullying, by any means, but if my Sioux-Mongolian non binary agricultural scientist significant other doesn’t deserve recognition equal to your Nantucket red Yale financier SAE, you’re automatically excluded from all tomorrow’s parties, with a “go fuck yourself” short snort. And by “all tomorrow’s parties,” I don’t mean Hamptons excursions — I mean influence and power (the same, in contemporary fuckonomics).

The wave coming isn’t the one Trumpistas are onanistic about.

]]>https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/09/07/a-hard-rains-a-gonna-fall/feed/0benjaminntaylorSalad Dayshttps://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/08/03/salad-days/
https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/08/03/salad-days/#respondSat, 04 Aug 2018 02:02:56 +0000http://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/08/03/salad-days/Maybe it was seventeen years ago. I was running 140 kph on a limit of Perryville that was for no more than 104, windows down, “Wish You Were Here” blazing on the stereo of a silent car, out to Caledonia. But like the album, there was no joy in my heart; this was a belated farewell to a state I’d loved and lost. In a few months, I’d be in New Hampshire for gods know what. This space — openness onto nowhere in all directions was not theirs. The sun opened vistas of remarkable majesty, mingled with the distinct odor of freshly mown hay, cow and horse shit.

I believe it was around 13.00 when I thought, “maybe I should never leave.”

]]>https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/08/03/salad-days/feed/0benjaminntaylorFiction.https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/07/25/5785/
https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/07/25/5785/#respondWed, 25 Jul 2018 07:23:54 +0000http://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/07/25/5785/A: Um, I guess I could talk about how I’ve always thought of myself as a copy of a Giacometti that went horribly wrong, like probably when I was like 3 months old and didn’t have to shit, but wanted to use my special Oskar Matzerath I just took a shit cry to fuck with my mother or just to get her attention or to really fuck with her and make her worry I was Cri du Chat despite being chromosomally sound but make her worry that the genotype had somehow gotten mixed up. Not because I’d be aware of doing those things at three months old, but so that 32 years later I’d get paranoid wondering if that’s the kind of adult I’d become, without the capability of never knowing if I was the kind of three month old who’d do that kind of shit.

Lindt: We could. Is that something you’d like to talk about, Andrew?

A: Nah, I just wanted to fuck with you. Life is that kind of cactus sometimes.

]]>https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/07/25/5785/feed/0benjaminntaylorA visit to a lakehttps://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/07/18/a-visit-to-a-lake/
https://benjaminntaylor.com/2018/07/18/a-visit-to-a-lake/#respondWed, 18 Jul 2018 17:00:04 +0000http://benjaminntaylor.com/?p=5783When I was 11, my parents took my sister and I to Zion, Ill. to walk the white sands and enjoy the Midwest’s sea. In preparation for a beach visit, I tried to lose weight. I quickly learned that’s not possible in a 24-hr frame. So I resorted to reading. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and on the way and at the lake, “Hamlet.” It’s cliché to say it, but that changed my life. I realized what transformative literature, what books could be and do. I don’t remember that beach or that crystalline lake. I remember those books, as I was never the same.
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